Todd Gloria and Carl DeMaio feud over city-service fees

The print version and the original online version of this week’s editorial in CityBeat includes this line:

It was [City Councilmember Todd] Gloria last week who successfully campaigned for the removal, from a new council policy on city-service fees, of language seeking to identify efficiencies that might lower fees, a move that has been viewed as thinly veiled marching orders from the unions.

That line has been removed from the online version of the editorial. The reason is that it didn’t include important information about why Gloria did what he did.

The removed line came as a result of a post by blogger Pat Flannery in which he castigated Gloria for doing the bidding of city employee unions by rejecting efforts to find efficiencies in city departments and reduce fees for people who use various services. There are fees the city charges people that don’t recover the full cost of providing certain services, and given the city’s huge budget problems, there’s an effort underway to raise those fees to recover the full cost.

In his post, Flannery includes video of the March 10 City Council meeting where that issue was discussed. I made the mistake of assuming Flannery had included all of the video of the relevant discussion. In the video, Gloria seemingly fails to articulate exactly why he was rejecting an effort by Councilmember Carl DeMaio to include in the city’s fee policy language about seeking efficiencies in hopes of lowering user fees.

On Tuesday morning, I asked Gloria spokesperson Katie Keach why Gloria did what he did. A few hours later, she responded in an e-mail:

Councilmember Gloria fully supports the efficiency of City departments, process and staff.  However, the way the item was structured would have required efficiencies to be identified before fees could be adjusted to recover costs for service.  This was an effort to push for reductions of staff and Managed Competition.

From Councilmember Gloria, “As recommended in the Policy, fees should be visited annually in the context of the budget process. There are clearly fees that are out of date and impact our General Fund more than they should. To wait for a resolution on the Managed Comp guide or to wait for more Business Process Reengineering reports to come forward will hinder and delay our ability to comply with the Kroll report’s recommendation of implementing appropriate cost recovery fees.

“This policy not only addresses new fees.  We have fees in place now that are outdated. The failure to revise those fees on a regular basis has contributed to our City’s structural deficit.”

I softened the original draft of our editorial, but I didn’t remove the reference entirely because Keach’s e-mail didn’t jibe with what I saw on the video. Also, it was my impression that Gloria voted for the efficiency language when it came up previously at the Budget Committee and had, for some reason, changed his mind. Furthermore, in Flannery’s excerpt, Gloria appears to be challenging DeMaio’s efforts ostensibly because they might get in the way of managed competition, which seemed disingenuous.

However, Keach’s e-mail did jibe with a part of the meeting Flannery didn’t include in his post. There was a whole discussion Flannery left out wherein Gloria explains clearly that he believes it’s unreasonable to wait for the city to go through a managed competition process (outsourcing) before it can raise a user fee. The city’s chief financial officer, Mary Lewis, states clearly that user fees would be reassessed annually, and that would allow the city to capture any efficiencies that might have been realized in the previous year and apply them to a reassessed fee, perhaps lowering it.

“I wouldn’t want anything to hold us up in moving ahead for full cost recovery where it’s appropriate,” Lewis said.

It also became clear that there had been changes to what Gloria voted for at the Budget Committee level before it got to the full council. During the meeting, DeMaio states that he had subsequently negotiated a compromise with the Mayor’s office.

CityBeat is wary of the influence the employee unions wield on the City Council, and I let that concern unfairly influence the language of our original editorial.